You got me. I think that the approach of having to subscribe to a community on every federated instance means that discovery is kind-of broken. I get that it is 'working as intended' but I think that may have had unintended consequences.

The result has been monolithic communities which are all the 'same', and it ends up splitting interests across communities, which will inevitably slow growth, and prevent lemmy from being a true reddit killer (this is basic math of networks and how they function).

I know the developers are doing their best, but I think at a high level lemmy needs to be reconsidered. Instances should be focusing on some niche thing, like poland ball humor, or skiing, or woodworking, each with niche communities within them. For example "wintersports" might have communtieis for skiing, cross country skiing, maybe one for showing off your new skiis, etc... That way your 'home' is around your central interest. Then allow 'all federation' across all instances (if you want to).

This wouldn't be so much a software change as a cultural change to how we approach making lemmy's (aside from the discovery issue).

I still think instances should be largely region based, which is why I started one for Colorado. As far as sharing it I'm not really sure either other than spamming it everywhere (which I also don't want to do). Instance discovery kind of sucks, you can't even search on the main join Lemmy page.